The delivery of information has become omnipresent in recent years with the advent of the Internet and the World-Wide Web (WWW). Moreover, browsers and viewers, which permit the information to be displayed, are now standard with any computing device acquired by a consumer today. By way of example only, some of the WWW browsers include Netscape, Internet Explorer, and others. Often these browsers are equipped with external viewer plugins, which facilitate viewing data in a variety of formats. Information used within a browser is often referred to as browser media. Other types of media, such as paged media exist as well.
Information viewed in a browser is optimally formatted or rendered to be displayed and traversed within the browser (e.g. within the browser media environment). Yet, that same data is not optimally viewed when it is transferred to a paged media. For example, a table of data viewed in a WWW browser may be displayed to user on a single screen, with or without the need to scroll the display screen viewer to the right or down to view the entire table. However, if the same table is selected for print and sent to a printer (e.g. paged media) from within the browser, the table may not reside on a single page when printed. In fact, the table may be truncated with information missing altogether from the table, or information will be separated on multiple pages making it extremely difficult to discern the tabular data provided. This problem of transferring data from a browser or a viewer to a printer is not uncommon and is not limited to tabular data. In fact, anyone who has selected what appeared to be well formatted information for printing in a WWW browser, is often astonished to discover that once the information is outputted to a paged media from the printer, the information is no longer suitable for viewing. Users may be forced to change the page setup within the printer, select landscape modes, and a variety of other choices in an attempt to get a paged media version of what they are currently viewing in a browser media on their computing device s monitor. Yet, modifying printer options will rarely fix the rendering problem associated with tabular data when tabular data is migrated from one media to another media.
Reconciling browser media and page media is problematic, particularly when attempting to render tabular data from a browser media to a paged media. This is so, because often the cells of a table, housed in a browser media data format, such as Hypertext Markup Language, and others, have dimensions and presentation attributes which will exceed the dimensions of a sheet of paper which is to include the cells of the table in an output paged media. To solve this, and many other problems associated with data presentation, an industry wide consortium developed a series of data format standards designed to assist in the transition of data being displayed in different media.
One primary standard is Extensible Markup Language (XML), which displays data in terms of its content devoid of any presentation attributes. Raw XML is not particularly useful in the displaying or the presentation of data in a browser or a paged media by itself, rather, the XML is useful in divorcing the proprietary presentation associated with each media from the data markup, thereby requiring each media to render the raw XML into a useful format prior to displaying it to a user. A number of rendering languages and standards have emerged to assist in this effort, such as by way of example only Extensible Stylesheets Language (XSL), Extensible Stylesheets Language Transformations (XSLT), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and others. These rendering languages provide guidelines and utilities to take raw XML and render it to a useful presentation format for a particular media.
Yet, even with the design consistency associated with a standard data format (e.g. XML), and a variety of additional rendering utilities and guidelines (e.g. XSL, XSLT, CSS), tabular data still presents a number of difficult problems when attempting to transfer the tabular data from a browser media to a paged media, since the table dimensions associated with a browser media will significantly vary in the paged media. Therefore, a single application to successfully render tables in both browser and paged media has proven to be elusive. Moreover, it would be cost prohibitive to provide individualized rendering translations for legacy browser media tables in order for them to be successfully transferred to paged media. Accordingly, a more generic approach needs to be developed such that tables may be rendered automatically from one media to another media without the need for individual translating applications.